A founder essay. After sixteen years in operations, HR, and change management inside Saudi enterprises, I left to become a full-time executive coach. People who knew me asked why. This is the honest answer.

The version of this story most people expect is a romantic one. I had a moment of clarity. I realised I wanted to help people. I felt called to a different kind of work.

That story is partly true and mostly wrong. The actual reason I left operations to become a coach is more practical, and I think more interesting, than the romantic version.

I left because I had spent sixteen years inside Saudi enterprises watching senior leaders make the same five mistakes, and I had concluded that the most leveraged thing I could do with the next twenty years of my career was to sit across from those leaders, one at a time, and help them not make those mistakes.

That is it. That is the whole story.

What I saw across sixteen years

I worked across retail, F&B, startups, and construction. Different industries, different revenue scales, different ownership structures. Different people in the senior seats. The mistakes the senior leaders were making were not different.

The most senior leader in the company was usually carrying decisions alone that they should have been thinking through with someone outside the system. The board could not be that someone, because the board was inside the system. The advisors could not be that someone, because the advisors had a stake in the outcome. The peers could not be that someone, because the peers were competing with the leader for resources. The leader was, structurally, alone.

The most senior leader in the company was usually receiving a curated version of organisational reality. Direct reports were filtering. Peers were managing around them. Advisors were softening. The leader felt informed and was not.

The most senior leader in the company was usually operating on patterns that had been rewarded for fifteen years and that were now costing them more than they were producing. The same intensity that got them promoted was now exhausting their team. The same control that got them through earlier roles was now blocking the next layer of leadership from emerging.

The most senior leader in the company often had no structured space to develop. Their development had been, for a decade, completely informal. They knew things needed to change in how they were operating. They did not have a place to do the changing.

The most senior leader in the company often did not have a confidential thinking partner. Not a friend. Not a mentor. Not an advisor. Someone whose job was the leader's effectiveness, with no other agenda. This role did not exist for almost anyone I worked with.

I watched these patterns recur across every senior engagement, across every industry. They were costing the companies, and they were costing the leaders personally. And nobody was solving them, because the people who could solve them, executive coaches with the right training and the right cultural fluency, were rare in the Kingdom.

What I decided

In 2018 I started taking the coaching path seriously. I trained inside the Tavistock tradition. I went through INSEAD. I got Prosci certified. I qualified as a Birkman consultant. I pursued the ICF credentials, ACC and then PCC, with the deliberate intention of becoming the kind of coach the senior leaders I had watched for sixteen years actually needed.

In 2024 I co-founded Saudi Executive Coaching with the explicit purpose of building the firm I would have wanted to call when I was watching the patterns from inside. A firm that took ICF accreditation seriously. A firm that integrated behavioural assessment, 360 feedback, and sustained coaching cadence. A firm that understood Saudi family-business dynamics, Vision 2030 pressures, and the specific cultural texture of senior decision-making in this region. A firm that did not import frameworks and apply them without translation.

The decision to leave operations was not difficult. It was the most logical move I had ever made in my career. I had identified the highest-leverage place I could spend my next twenty years, and I had positioned myself to be qualified to do the work. The romantic version of the story is not how I made the decision. The practical version is.

What this means for the leaders I now sit with

I sit, most weeks, across from CEOs, GMs, CFOs, CTOs, COOs of significant Saudi enterprises. I do not pretend to know more about their industry than they do. I do not pretend to know more about their company than they do. What I have, and what they need, is a structured discipline for surfacing the patterns they are currently invisible to themselves.

The work is rarely dramatic. It is structured, sustained, and quietly effective. The senior leaders who engage with it for nine or twelve months operate differently afterwards. Their teams operate differently. Their decisions land differently. The organisations they lead, in aggregate, work better.

This is what I left operations to do. It is, I think, the highest-leverage thing I am qualified to do in my career.

The bottom line

I do not have a romantic story about leaving operations. I have a practical one. The Kingdom needs more senior leaders to be operating at their actual ceiling rather than well below it, and the most leveraged way I can contribute to that is one coaching relationship at a time.

For senior leaders considering whether the work is worth doing, the simplest test is honest reflection on whether you are currently being thought-partnered by anyone whose only job is your effectiveness. If the answer is no, the gap is real, and closing it is one of the most overlooked moves in senior leadership.

Read more about the firm I built, or begin a confidential conversation.

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FAQ

Why did Abdulelah Alhadidi leave operations? After sixteen years across operations, HR, and change management inside Saudi enterprises, he concluded that the highest-leverage place he could spend his next twenty years was as an executive coach to senior leaders, helping them avoid the patterns he had watched recur consistently across the Kingdom.

What is the founder's coaching philosophy? That senior leaders need a structured, confidential thinking partnership with someone outside the system whose only agenda is their effectiveness. The work integrates ICF coaching methodology, behavioural assessment, 360 feedback, and Tavistock-informed group dynamics, applied with deep familiarity with Saudi enterprise context.

How was Saudi Executive Coaching founded? SEC was co-founded in 2024 by Abdulelah Alhadidi as the firm he would have wanted to call when he was watching senior leadership patterns from inside operational roles. The firm is built on ICF accreditation, sustained engagement design, and explicit cultural fluency in Saudi and GCC enterprise contexts.